The 20 Greatest Food Bloggers of All Time

What makes a great food blog? First and foremost, a recognition that food blogging is different than food writing, or even reporting on food issues. It’s not that food bloggers don’t write or report, but rather that they do so with a different (and often more relentless) rhythm. And the best ones—whether they’re scribing a link roundup or a weekly feature or a stunner of an exclusive—they put their back into it, too.

Great food blogs go beyond restaurants, recipes, scenes, celebrities, or a trending pieces of news. They have a voice. They have ideas. they become a dialogue with readers and with the subjects they cover, whether those subjects like it or not. And often, they really, really haven’t liked it.

But we have. And, clearly, so have countless other readers, as evidenced by the explosion of food blogs over the past eight or nine years, our own included. But it’s pretty obvious that ubiquity doesn’t lend itself to quality—again, we say this as a nascent food blog less than a year old—and a lot of truly awful crap has also come out of those eight or nine years. Not that the bottom-feeders give great food blogs a bad name; more so, they underline the fact that great food blogs (and the people who run them) were always, and still are, the exception to the rule. They are, in every sense of the word, exceptional. They are also, in many of the cases herein, responsible for all of their pathetic imitators. The crown: it’s heavy.

A note on geography: We’re talking here about American food blogs, so if your favorite street-eats blogger from Bangkok didn’t make the cut, it’s no snub. And secondly, the list is very centralized in New York for a reason—if you look at the trailblazing food-blogging operations that have morphed into national brands, almost all of them (Eater, Grubstreet, Serious Eats) got their start in NYC. Blame it on the rest of the country for not getting with the program when New Yorkers started these crazy blog things en masse in 2004.

A note, too, on the cast: Many great food writers—Francis Lam, Jonathan Gold, Peter Meehan, Adam Sachs—have been omitted in light of their blog-specific efforts (or lack thereof), as have numerous blog editors who steer the ships but don’t always hop into the fray themselves. Some of the people on this list had thousands of posts in the can before they hung up their blogging gloves. One of them had only seven but changed the game in terms of what it meant to be an important character in the food world. In either case, one thing is constant: Great food bloggers have great runs.

And during these epic streaks of Internet glory, great bloggers usually demonstrate some recognition of the sheer absurdity of the enterprise: It is, after all, just food. And you can only do so much with it. You have to get creative.

All of the people that made our list have great posts, sure, and moments that stick out above others. But the best of them—the ones at the very top of the pile—don’t really have a single post that can be pointed to as a game-changer, so much as an entire catalogue and repertoire of note. They’re the people who didn’t just change the tone of the daily conversation about food, restaurants, dining out, the rising tide of celebrity in the food world, and the characters and scenes driving it all—they changed the conversation itself.

kevinEats

The L.A. Restaurant Obsessive

Blogs:kevinEatsPrime era: Now.
In a nutshell: This guy is a one-man powerhouse, covering the L.A. restaurant scene with the level of detail that few media companies can muster. He shares food adventures from the road as well, but it's on his home turf that he's truly made himself indispensable. Not a single hot opening gets by him, and his "reviews" are exactly what you want from a blogger—instead of flowery prose, Kevin takes great hi-res photos and documents his meals dish-by-dish, always including practical information like the price and images of the full menu. While we bemoan the Yelpication of restaurant criticism, Kevin makes a strong case for why restaurant bloggers are relevant.
Required reading: For L.A. eaters, Kevin's Dining Map is an essential bookmark. He also maintains a meticulous, alphabetized list of the best dish in any given category, from abalone to xiaolongbao.

Dave Arnold

The Mad Scientist

Blog(s):Cooking IssuesPrime era: 2009-2012...Arnold hops in and out of the fray depending on what projects he's got going on, but those were some of his most productive years.
Revenge of the nerds. Forget Alton Brown—if you're a real food-science geek, Dave Arnold should be your messiah. As Director of Culinary Technology of the French Culinary Institute, he basically spends his days doing crazy food experiments and playing around with sous-vide machines and Roto-Vaps—and then telling you the coolest stuff he learned along the way, and how to apply it at home. And unless you're willing to shell out hundreds of bucks for Modernist Cuisine, Arnold is your direct link to trends in avant-garde cooking—only instead of thinking about techniques from a chef's perspective, he thinks about how they can revolutionize the way regular folks really cook. Reading the blog is like peeking into the future to see what the everyman kitchen will look like 2025.
Small font: The website is almost impossible to read, but that just adds to its "nerds only" vibe. (We suggest copying the text and blowing it up in Microsoft Word.)
Drink to the man: Arnold is also the mastermind behind Booker and Dax, the next-level Momofuku cocktail bar, where coupes are chilled with liquid nitrogen and hot drinks are warmed on the spot with flaming rods. He documents the development of some of these drinks on the blog, providing great conversation material for a night of boozing with fellow cocktail nerds.
Required reading: Check out his primers on modernist techniques like liquid nitrogen, hydrocolloids, and meat glue.

David Chang

The PPX Guest Blogger

Blog(s): Eater.
Prime era: 2007
Excuse me? Yep! David Chang used to blog for Eater. Really, it was more of a “guest columnist” type-deal, but seeing as how it wasn’t feature-writing, and they were semi-regular, and they were on a blog, we decided to count Chang as a food blogger…and a great one, too. Also, one of the first chefs who dared to do battle on the grounds so many had already come to healthily loathe by that point. We take no great pleasure in the fact that this is no doubt an honor that will annoy him, if not everyone else. We will, however, find amusement in it.
This is bullshit! Uh, not really. Have you read any of it? Every one of his posts was a haymaker unto itself, the kind of thing that broke as much news as it made, and offered sharp perspective on it at the same time. In other words: Classically great blogging, and a mastery of form. Finally, need we remind you that Chang is one of the forces behind Lucky Peach, arguably the most impressive new food periodical to arrive in the last 20 years? Chang’s blog posts for Eater—and the fact that he chose that venue for them—were the first signs of what was to come. Before the best-selling cookbooks, and before all of the canny interviews, or lectures, or speaking panels, and before the food quarterly, there was Chang on Eater, a veritable Dylan at The Gaslight of food blogging.
Allowable Conspiracy Theory: ‘Fuck you, Meehan writes all his raps, anyway.’Required Reading: All of it, where you can find it (it's off the menu these days, but we'llhelpgetyou started). Though, if you're looking for the most crucial of the entries, there's the time he wrote about waiting to get reviewed by Frank Bruni—something nobody had read on a blog, at the time—and the time he decided to counter-protest foie gras activists camped outside Momofuku Ko by "adding at least one foie gras dish to each of our menus...and we'll donate any proceeds from these dishes to charity."
The Quotable Chang: [If Momofuku Ssam Bar recieved one star] "It’s our nightmare. Both Momofukus would close; the entire staff would be tarred & feathered. Quino would take a job at Whole Foods, work for ten years, score some nice benefits and gradually work his way up to assistant manager. Hey, he’s getting married, he needs the steady work. I would try crack, black tar heroin and crystal meth for the first time, possibly all three at once. Anything that would take me to a happy place. After rehab, I’d get my GED and start working for the man."
Semi-pointless sports analogy: If you think Dave Chang has no place on this list, remember that even J.R. Rider got a championship ring. Think about that.

Ruth Reichl

The Foodie All Other Foodies Aspire to Be

Blog(s):ruthreichl.comPrime era:2011-2013
The only personal blog that matters. Okay, maybe that's an overstatement, but generally any URL that follows the template "person's name dot com" is a repository of meaningless, self-obsessed struggle. Not so for former Gourmet editor and food-world royalty Ruth Reichl, who details her charmed life of artisanal jams, heirloom vegetables, and pitch-perfect cake recipes with the sort of purple prose only she can pull off. Her running list of "Things I Love" is like a continuation of the pages of the deeply mourned Gourmet, and when she drops lines like "I feel a certain responsibility for their being in this country" when discussing pimientos de padron, she's not bluffing. Straight up: Riechl was an #infuencer before it was a hashtag, and she's earned the right to teach you how to have better taste.
Twitter legend: Reichl's haiku-like breakfast tweets (sample: "Yellow birds in a blue sky. Tart local apricots, sliced. One sweet balsamic drop. Lemonade. Fresh mint. Savoring summer.") inspired the infamous parody account @RuthBourdain. And we all know good tweeters make good bloggers. It's science.
Required reading Her annual gift guides are better than anything you'll find in most glossy magazines, but she makes the most waves when she pulls back the curtain on the ridiculously fabulous lifestyles of the fooderati—for example, when she recently detailed writer Francis Lam's wedding menu, cooked by A-list chefs like Grant Achatz, Danny Bowien, and Ashley Christensen, and declared it a time capsule of "how we were eating in 2013." Yeah...our lives suck in comparison, but we still love Ruth.

Amanda Cohen

Chef. Blogger. Superhero.

Blog:Dirt CandyPrime era: 2009-2011
Personal Branding 101: In an age where chefs grovel for Twitter followers and just cooking is rarely enough to make you "relevant," Cohen proves that you can play the game without losing your heart. The fact that she maintains her very sharp, very funny blog on her own restaurant's website is indicative of her approach: Everything is personal, and all path's lead back to Dirt Candy's mission—to celebrate female chefs in a male-dominated field; to celebrate vegetarian cooking in a meat-obsessed restaurant scene; and to promote more honest conversation about how and what we eat. Sure, she now shills for Wustof knives, but guess what? She blogged about that, too, letting readers in on the process of corporate endorsements in the food world.
DGAF: Good, provocative blogging often requires thick skin and a DGAF attitude, and Cohen is firmly in possession of both. While the restaurant industry marked by a lot of behind-the-scenes griping but not enough public debate (see: Eater's all-anonymous "Airing of Grievances"), Cohen consistently leads the league in real talk. One of her greatest blog coups was the "Reviews Reviewed" franchise, in which she'd lay it all out in response to major media reviews of Dirt Candy (like The New Yorker and the New York Times), revealing not only the logistics of fact-checking and photo shoots, but also her frank feelings on what was said. Who else (besides maybe Chang) has the gumption to say that a Times writeup left her feeling "nothing" (and clown some of the writer's criticisms), only to turn around and get a two-star review a few years later? Boss.
Master of the form: Dirt Candy may rock a pretty Web 1.0 website, but let it be said that long before Buzzfeed got GIF-happy, Cohen was a trailblazer in the art of using funny in-line images (especially pandas), creating lists of things like holiday sweaters, and finding hilarious miscellany from the '80s.
Blog to cookbook...but not the way you'd expect: Cohen never wanted to do the cookie-cutter cookbook thing, so she went and made a f**king awesome comic book instead. Props.
Essential reading: Cohen's no-nonsense guide to "How to Be a Chef" should be on the syllabus at every culinary school in the world.

Bonjwing Lee

The Dude Who Gives Gastronauts Vicarious Thrills

Blog(s):Ulterior EpicurePrime era:2009-2013
In a nutshell. Besides mega-mook millionaires who view fine-dining as a belt-notching sport, it's safe to say that few people go to as many Michelin-starred restaurants as Lee, who outed his identity to Eater in 2009 (he had previously been anonymous). This culinary big-game hunting would be an annoying, jealousy-inducing venture if he didn't do such a good job of documenting his adventures, with stunning photographs and service-oriented writeups of each meal.
How does he afford all that? Unclear. In that Eater interview from 2009, he said, "I don't generally like to take things for free," in the same breath that he mentioned a comp at elBulli (though, to be fair, years of anonymity suggest that he doesn't actively seek out freebies). Ultimately though, those ethical questions are largely irrelevant—for those of us who aren't going to be jet-setting to Noma and Pujol anytime soon, Lee's meticulous documentation is less about the recommendations and more about the anthropological subtext of the whole endeavor. In sum, his meal recaps serve as a fascinating snapshot of a certain type of dining around the world—avant-garde, molecular, trendy, whatever you want to call it. And in an age when chefs are as interconnected as ever, visiting each other's restaurants and attending conferences together, it's interesting to see what common ideas prevail from place to place in terms of flavor combinations, ingredients, and plating. Lee is on the front lines, capturing it all—mark our words, his archives will be an important culinary time capsule one day.
Required reading While Lee is generally mild-mannered and focused on experiences rather than broad analysis, he did memorably go to town on this year's San Pelligrino "World's 50 Best Restaurant" list, calling it "at best…the fifty trendiest (or most-publicized) restaurants in the world, as determined by a rather insular group of voters." While he noted that he's not "qualified" to criticize the list, the fact is the opinion did meant something coming from one of the few people complaining about the list who had actually been to a bunch of these place (seven of the top 10, and 27 of the top 50). He showed some balls there, and helped catalyze a useful debate about the meaning of superlatives in the food world.
And if you don't care about all that, just check out his annual "best dishes" roundups.
Also See: Lee is part of a cabal of other camera-ready international diners with Flickr photo sets that'll make you want to cry—notably, A Life Worth Eating, Chuck Eats, and Luxeat.

Mark Bittman

The Issues Man

Blog(s):The New York Times' On Food/Bittman
Prime era: 2011
Post-Minimalist: After a career as the routinely-lauded writer of the Times Minimalist cooking column, as well as the author of some of the most essential American cookbooks pretty much ever, Bittman took on a role as an opinion columnist with the paper's Sunday Review column in 2011, joining the likes of Thomas L. Friedman, Maureen Dowd, David Brooks, and a bunch of other lazy once-a-week filing punkmotherfuckers we can't stand (Bruni: Don't even look at us, you quitter). That said, he also joined the ranks of very, very smart people like Joe Nocera and Paul Krugman, and started blogging, and past that, preaching the politics of what he's quietly practiced for so long: That food is a simple thing to get right in our lives, so long as we recognize and shed light on the evil forces so often trying to make it so wrong.
Medium Rare: Bittman's blogging career started slow, but eventually picked up a little speed as he figured out how to use his platform: Mostly, as a way to annotate weekly columns and respond to comments. But he also used it as a way to aggressively tackle food issues in a way most writers didn't (or couldn't): Hunger as a disease, and notes from fasting. Farm animal protection issues. A breakdown of poll results about GMOs. And, of course, a few hundred words about water for pasta. He also hosted a four-part series of the scourge of the lionfish (no, really).
Quotable Bittman: "In the European Union, products containing nanoparticles must be registered as such. Here, of course, there is no such ruling. Once again, the point is the same: the F.D.A. should be determining whether ingredients are safe before allowing manufacturers to include them in products that enter or come into contact with our bodies. Period." It's your typical bit of Bittman prose: Sharp, to the point, and on point.
Notable Dustup: Bittman apologized for calling the late VP of PR for Chick-Fil-A a pig.
Would Be Ranked Higher If: He posted more often. Also, if he didn't apologize for calling the head flack of PR for Chick-Fil-A a pig a week after he died (but that's just us).

Eddie Huang

The Cultural Shitkicker

Blog(s):Fresh Off The BoatPrime era: 2010-2011
The Magic Don Huang: Before hisVICE show, and before his ABC sitcom deal, and before Anthony Bourdain basically endorsed Eddie as the next Anthony Bourdain? There was a guy with a bao place on the Lower East Side (and now, on 14th Street) with a shifty little blog. No, really: Hosted on Blogspot, the thing couldn't look more retrograde if it tried. And yet, it's all the better to showcase Eddie's voice and writing, which was just as often about food as it was about the cultural identity of Asians who make food. Who knew the former lawyer-turned-weed-dealer-turned-short-order-restaurateur had such electric, dazzling, hilarious prose in him? Once he hit his stride, everyone took note, including Jay Z's editor Chris Jackson, who eventually helped Eddie accomplish the rare feat of publishing a truly worthy book named for the blog that helped start it. That book—Fresh Off the Boat—went on to become a New York Times bestseller.
Required reading: Eddie's book is a narrative, but Eddie's blog is a shitshow-in-real-time type deal that exemplifies the reason blogs were invented. Take, for example, that time his now-shuttered Lower East Side restaurant Xiao Ye—which at one point tried to promote an all-you-can-drink Four Loko special—was artfully slammed by Sam Sifton at the New York Times. Eddie responded by posting the e-mail he got from his mother in light of the review, where she admonishes him and suggests that he keep his New York State Bar License active. Or that time Jeremy Lin changed everything. Or Eddie's favorite restaurants, 2011. Or why all the folks in the food scene who talk about slow food are "a bunch of Zoolanders." Along with all the haters, Eddie's wit made lots of friends on the Internet, earning him some memorable guest gigs—take, for example, his infamous Next Iron Chef recaps for Eater, or his columns for the New York Observer, in which he made enemies out of everyone from Marcus Samuelsson to Guy Fieri and back.
The Quotable Eddie Huang: "Look, it's cheesy to put your own shit on a list, but I'm not a liar. Baohaus is my 9th favorite place to eat in the city and if I didn't eat here 7 days a week, it'd probably be higher up."

Daniel Vaughn

The "Barbecue Snob"

Blog(s):Full Custom BBQ GospelPrime era: 2008-2012
Isn't that the dude who was hired as the first BBQ editor of Texas Monthly? Yes, exactly. But he earned that undeniably awesome title only after years of traversing the Longhorn State to document its smokehouse culture in mind-boggling detail—according to a profile that ran in the New York Times in March, he's been to more than 600 barbecue since starting the blog in 2007, including more than 500 in Texas. Now, he's got a book—The Prophets of Smoked Meat—that offers a primer on everything from legendary pit masters, to the differences between Central and East Texas barbecue.
So basically this dude is totally obsessed with brisket and ribs? Um, yes. And that's why he's so excellent. When it comes to single-subject bloggers, it's not always about who takes the best photos or writes the best prose—it's about who has the endurance and sheer willpower to be a completist. It's one thing to do it in a dense city, training your eye on tacos or burgers, but quite another to do it in Texas, where getting to all of these BBQ joints involves driving thousands upon thousands of miles. What's most impressive is that before snagging the editor gig, Vaughn kept up the blog while holding down a job at an architecture firm. (Also impressive: The fact that he is still standing.)
Required reading: Vaughn's BBQ blogging is more about the sum of its parts than any one banger post. If you're on smoked meat trail, his Texas BBQ Map is a gift from the 'cue gods.

Adam Roberts

The Tireless Jack of All Trades

Blogs(s): The Amateur Gourmet, as well as contributions to Serious Eats, Salon, and more.
Prime era: No lie, this dude has been going strong for almost a decade.
'Bout that blog life: Like Lil' Cease said, "Don't be fooled by the baby face." Roberts may still look like he just walked out of freshman orientation, but in the blog world, he's an O.G., with posts dating back all the way to 2004, when he first started cooking as an escape from the soul-sapping realities of law school.
Started from the bottom... You've got to hand it to Roberts. He's a polarizing personality, funny in that awkward, drama geek sort of way (he briefly attended NYU’s Tisch School of Dramatic Writing), but his never-quit attitude took him to impressive heights: A Food Network web series where he interviewed the likes of Rachael Ray, Anthony Bourdain, and Alice Waters; two cookbooks full of A-list cameos; and freelance gigs for the likes of Food & Wine and Huffington Post. If we can agree that blogging is partly an act of dogged determination and savvy self-promotion, Roberts is a king of the genre.
Multimedia extravaganza: Part of the success of Amateur Gourmet comes down to its unbridled creativity, which ranges from mini musicals to comics. If you don't like the reviews and recipes, you might like the video chats with food-world personalities, or the how-tos, or the bizarre dramatization of the making of a lobster roll. Roberts is that kind of annoying eager beaver who keeps knocking at your door and doing a different act, until eventually you're just like, "Goddamn, this guy is talented."
One of the G.O.A.T blog posts in any genre: Roberts' comic strips are indicative of his multifaceted approach, and none is more epic than his illustrated 2009 review of dinner at El Bulli, where he went after five years of trying to get a reservation. Just when media coverage of the "world's best restaurant" was reaching saturation point, the comic-strip narrative not only provided one of the most honest depictions of the experience, but also cut through all its preciousness with gleeful zaniness.

Adam Kuban

The Pathologically Obsessive Single-Foodstuff Blogger

Blog(s):Slice, A Hamburger Today, Serious EatsPrime era: 2008 (when Serious Eats won a James Beard Award)
Peep the undercarriage. Kuban may not have been the first single-food blogger in the game, but he was the Michael Jordan of that shit, raising the bar for all those who followed. So many of the nerdy tropes we're familiar with today—the "undercarriage" shot to show the char on a pizza crust, the "dissection" of a juicy burger—were developed under his curatorship of Slice and AHT. When it comes to obsessive, details-over-everything food blogging, Kuban is the G.O.A.T. Those two blogs are undoubtedly influential, and there was a time when his posts on Slice, in particular, were essential reading for New York eaters.
Still in the game: Kuban left Serious Eats in 2011, but he's still in the mix as a contributing editor for Slice, and he remains one of the ultimategurus on New York's most iconic foodstuff.
Required reading: The taxonomies of regional pizza styles and burger varieties are absolutely indispensable for anyone interested in American foodways. And if you want to escape this cruel world for an hour or so, open up his absurd collection of pizza photography and let bliss wash over you in an awesome wave.

Ryan Sutton

The Numbers-Cruncher

Blog(s):The Bad Deal and The Price HikePrime era: Right now. THE SUTTON is still in the game, and very much in his prime.
Basically: The side-projects of Bloomberg’s food critic—which he runs on his own time for free—are of higher quality and greater value than what most of the food bloggers and food writers in the world actually get paid to do. Real talk.
The Good Deal: If he wanted to, Ryan Sutton could probably just stick to his day job as Bloomberg’s food critic, a gig with influence that can’t be overstated: He has a captive, typically moneyed audience of Bloomberg terminal users who can bring up his entire review archive in just a few keystrokes. And we do think he's a hell of a critic. But Sutton's blogs about the current state of food and restaurants as viewed through the prisms of consumer-side experiences and economics are incredibly fun, incredibly servicey reads. They are also, bar none, the best blogging effort of any working food critic right now that aren't a regular filing.
The Good Stuff: Take in the range, from the useful (an index of steak prices), to the sensible (why you shouldn't eat at Resturant Week), to the impassioned (on the importance of dining out), to the better-than-your-own critic's table scraps—Sutton can do it all.
The Good Word: Of all people, it was Sutton who protested the 2012 James Beard Award that went to GQ's Alan Richman, following a highly controversial takedown of M. Wells. Usually, the reason someone is alone in speaking out on something as insular as this is because they're either jealous or insane. Sutton, for the record, spoke bravely. And while we're at it: Correctly. Preach.

Deb Perelman

The Homecooking Queen

Blog(s):Smitten KitchenPrime era: 2007-2012
Julie Powell didn't completely ruin everything: It's impossible to talk about food blogging without acknowledging the vast legions of recipe bloggers and DIY cooks that fill the Internet with ideas for cute hors d'oeuvres to serve at your Royal Baby Watch party. Some of these are genuinely terrible, and part of the reason why foodie has become a dirty word in pop culture. But those who rise to the top of the heap—like the author of Julie & Julia—have been influential on many fronts, not least their ability to turn blogs into books and shake up the publishing industry. Powell's blog may have spawned a Hollywood movie, but Perelman's is, in our opinion, way more likable.
Fun fact: The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook (Knopf, 2012) sold more copies than most professional chefs could ever dream about. While it would be a mistake to read too deeply into that statistic, but the fact remains that Perelman has a main line to the amateur American home cook, and she built that connection without the help of the Food Network or any major media push. The backstory certainly helped win over an audience: She originally started her blog (then called Smitten) in 2003 to document the trials of single life, but then she found love, and the blog shifted focus to cooking. And even if the cooking for mah man (and later, mah family) narrative doesn't do it for you, the recipes are always on point, with great photos and easy-to-follow step-by-step instructions. If you feel like you've seen countless other blogs that look similar, it's only because Perelman helped set the template.
Required reading: Check out the impressive Recipe Index, pick something you want to make, and get cooking. Perelman's readers ride hard for her, as is evidenced by the comments, for someone just diving in it, the recipes are what drive this project.
See also: In the realm of recipe blogging, Food52 and the Kitchn are consistently impressive, though they're the result more of a team effort than any individual. Other notable recipe bloggers to check out include the legendary Dorie Greenspan for baking, Michael Ruhlman, and Clotilde Dusoulier's Chocolate and Zucchini.

Michael W. Twitty

The Culinary Historian

Blog(s):Afroculinaria and The Cooking GenePrime era: 2009-2013
Does he take good photos of tasting menus? No, this is a totally different type of blogging, so relax your mind and set your conscience free—you might just learn something. Twitty is a culinary anthropologist with an underrepresented beat: The foodways of enslaved African and African Americans, and how they continue to influence the way we eat. In addition to the unique angle, it's the research that makes Afroculinaria stand out; the blog is essentially an ever-evolving museum of black food culture around the world, designed to honor what Twitty describes as "the vast number of unknown Black cooks across the Americas that were essential in the creation of the creole cuisines of Atlantic world."
The Cooking Gene, meanwhile, was a standalone, crowd-funded project that traced Twitty's journey from Maryland to Louisiana, exploring his genealogy and the legacy of slavery through food along the way—fascinating, meaty stuff.
Also awesome: His Twitter handle is @KosherSoul. What do you know about African American seders? Probably nothing, which is yet another reason to read Twitty, who is a Judaic studies teacher in D.C. and uses his blog to explore the importance of foodways to Jewish culture.
MAD props: Twitty just presented at Rene Redzepi and David Chang's MAD Symposium in Copenhagen, solidifying the respect he's earned among the food world's leading thinkers.
Required reading. If you want a taste of why Twitty's voice matters in the current landscape of food media, read An Open Letter to Paula Deen

Gael Greene

The Upper West Side Septuagenarian Who Figured Out the Internet

Blog(s):Insatiable CriticPrime era:Current.
The pedigree: For four decades, Greene served as a constant, salacious narrator of the NYC dining scene as restaurant critic at New York Magazine. While she accrued her fair share of detractors along the way, there's no denying her legacy as an arbiter of taste through the decades that ultimately shaped food culture we know today—from a time when there were no celebrity chefs and no one called themselves foodies, right through to the Age of the Cronuts (Greene, for the record, is not into them).
But…she's a little eccentric, no? Totally, which makes her perfect for the Internet. She already had her haters in tow before becoming a blog personality, and as we all know, you're not a real online power player without haters. She has the zero-fucks-given attitude of a New Yorker who has seen more than you probably ever will, and she's entirely comfortable with her anachronistic uptown snootiness, often discussing her car service rides to the Lower East Side or Brooklyn as if they are great adventures into a land populated by wild, tattooed heathens. In other words, she's a goddamn character.
The question of comps: We're talking about best bloggers here, not Humanitarian of the Year. Many of Greene's "reviews" openly discuss solicitous chefs and dishes sent out by the kitchen. But that's nothing new: Back in 1977, she titled a review of Le Cirque “I Love Le Cirque, but Can I Be Trusted?”, then went on to discuss her liaison with the chef de cuisine, Jean-Louis Todeschini. You don't read Greene so much for the actual restaurant recommendations—though beyond the ethical haze and sometimes fusty preferences, she still has very good taste—but rather for the entertaining point of view, as well as the often remarkable prose.
But…the photos are bad: She's nearly 80 years old. What's your grandma doing? The shoddy camera work is part of the charm.
Favorite lunch spot: "I try to do all my business lunches and other seductions in the mysteriously cosmetic light of the back room at Jean Georges where the two course prix fixe is now $29.50 and you only get four macaroons instead of eight (recession fallout) but there is never less than one “oh-my-god” dish (and often two) that reminds me why I’m still thrilled to be a restaurant critic after forty two years."
Required reading: At the end of the day, Greene is still one of the food world's most dexterous wordsmiths. Read her goodbye to Steven Richter, her partner of 25 years who died last year, and behold a writer who is still fully in control of her gifts. This post on the best restaurants for seduction is also a doozy.

Amanda Kludt

The Legacy Maker

Blog(s):Eater New YorkPrime era: 2008-2012
Heiress to the Throne: Seeing as how Eater had become the game-changing monster/restaurant and food scene blog that nobody in New York's could've seen coming, there was only one direction for it to go after its co-founder, Ben Leventhal, took a leave of absence to go pursue other ventures: Down. After all, who else could possibly man that post and pull off the kind of masterful dance that inspires as much compulsive reading and admiration as it does fear and loathing? (And that's to say nothing of the chutzpah it takes to get screamed at by everyone in the restaurant world, and deal with that sarlacc pit of a commentariat, notoriously some of the worst on the civilized Internet.) Not a man at all, as it turned out, but 24 year-old NYU grad Amanda Kludt—previously an editor at now-defunct travel blog Gridskipper—who took over Eater sometime after Leventhal abdicated, in January 2008 (first post, here). By that time, imitators had begun popping up everywhere, and the question of whether or not a Kludt-driven Eater could stay the course was less critical than that of whether or not she could keep the brand above the rising water of nearly ubiquitous competition (which, at times, included Leventhal himself). The answer? A resounding one, in the affirmative.
The Run: As Eater had played it a little fast and loose with the restaurant-world gossip in its early years, Amanda was less gunslinger, more gumshoe, and started to ground the site's news gathering operation in a stronger topsoil of sourcing than it had before. Eater's trademark regular features remained as gimlet-eyed as ever, like its New York Times critic-betting feature, a hallmark of the site. That one has gone on through two more critics ("Sift Happens" for Sam Sifton and "Wells-Wagering" for Pete Wells) and remains a weekly must-read. Its various theme weeks (Shitshow Week, for example) underwent expansions in size and scope. But there's no better way to judge an Eater legacy than by the various things they've been called by people around the service industry, and Kludt gave the male-dominated business much consternation (much of which remains inside baseball lore—like that time a certain TV chef celeb said something not-so-nice on that one phone call—and some of which is very public). Finally, it's worth noting that first-wave Grub Street blogger Josh Orzersky loves telling people that Kludt was a former student of his at NYU, and has also admitted that she took part in the unraveling of his sanity as his competition. So there's that. But Kludt—after spending four years (i.e., an eternity) on the same blog—eventually rose to the position of Eater's editorial director, and she has helped oversee the expansion of Eater's several blogs around the country.
Also see: Kludt's knack for raising talent is a particular strength of hers. Take, for example, current Eater NY editor Greg Morabito, who had to step into Kludt's shoes after she rose to the position of editorial director, and has done a more than fine job of steering the ship since. Or Matt Duckor, who's now the multimedia editor at Bon Appétit. Or even Gabe Ulla, who just went to go work for Mad Food/Mad.com, the editorial outpost of new reigning worldwide restaurant king, René Redzepi's Noma. All three were in the same intern class, talent cultivated by Kludt.

Robert Sietsema

The Old-School Journeyman

Blog(s):The Village Voice's Fork In The Road, Eater
Prime era: 2008-2013
Not a Second Act: Sietsema started reviewing restaurants for the Voice in '93. Mind you, this was after a life in a band with Elliott Sharp (Mofungo), for which Yo La Tengo's Ira Kaplan was a roadie, as well as a life as a graduate student in Texas. The man's had life experience, and he brought that hard-earned sensibility first to his reviews, and then to his blogging.
Follow That Bob! When the overlords at the Village Voice mandated that all of their writers start regularly contributing to the website, one of the great upshots was the start of Sietsema's blogging canon, much of which consisted of lists that may as well serve as definitive maps for outer-borough New York eating. Where outlets like the Times and New York Magazine tirelessly tried to keep up with the established food blog world by targeting buzzy scenes—and only occasionally dipping a toe into what would be adventurous waters for their readers—Sietsema followed his heart (and stomach) for esoteric eats, and told all the stories that everyone else couldn't or wouldn't. For example, the best things to eat in Chinatown? A decent trick. But how many critics can truly pull off the best Sichuan restaurants in New York City? His favorite joints in Queens and Brooklyn, meanwhile, didn't read like anyone else's. Do we think Oasis is the second-best place in Brooklyn? Hell no. But his lists are, as they say, unfuckwithable, if only because lesser critics haven't even gone to, no less heard of, half of these places, nor could they recognize just how crucial a place like Oasis actually is. Question not this man's integrity nor daring: While other food writers are bloviating dicks who are full of bull—Seitsema's a nice guy who actually eats his fill of bull dicks. True story.
The Sietsema Sampler Platter: Sietsema's blog posts were more than just lists—so much more. What other respectable food critic has reviewed weed sodas? Few (except for maybe Ryan Sutton) have gone after other food writers quite like Sietsema did, either. A.A. Gill? Never come back. And where's Restaurant Girl now? Have anything to say about Brooklyn, and this man has words for you. But maybe best remembered of all is when Seitsema absolutely eviscerated fellow food writer Josh Orzersky for shamelessly taking a bunch of freebees at his own wedding, a brouhaha that essentially summed up the state of food blogging in the modern age (and how driven by nepotistic favor and uncritical thinking it truly is).
Don't Call It a Comeback: Sietsema was laid off by the philistines currently hellbent on the total destruction of the Village Voice. Thankfully, he was picked up by Eater, where he now contributes regularly and delivers maps of sections of New York City you never knew existed, just as he always has. And of course, still regularly schools lesser critics and writers. Full disclosure: We also employ his inimitable savvy to cover such things as the the history of marijuana cookery and the legend of the mini hot dog.

Josh Ozersky

Mr. Cutlets (Know Him By No Other Name)

Blog(s):Grub Street, The FeedbagPrime era: 2006-2009
Making of the Man-Meat: Josh Ozersky has a deeper origin mythology than possibly anybody on this list. Where did he come from? (Miami and/or Atlantic City.) Why did he start eating? (He was a loner, and a self-taught gastronome.) And why did he choose "Mr. Cutlets" as his moniker? (Melville—that's why.) Quite simply, Josh Ozersky exemplified the obsessive weirdness of food blogging to the umpteenth degree, as the co-founding editor of Grub Street, New York Magazine's attempt to give Eater a run for its money (intro post, here).
The Run: Mr. Cutlets was one of the first food bloggers to actively acknowledge and interact with a critic (New York's Adam Platt) while keeping a sort of church-state separation between the two professions (those posts are still pretty amazing). Remember that time he got gaut? He blogged about it, with hints of shame, and top-notes of pride. Ozersky was always less snarky than he was celebratory, less wildcard than wild omnivore. That isn't to say the man couldn't make enemies—he was once banned from the Momofuku empire for posting a menu without David Chang's blessing (bawse). Josh Ozersky was an establishment counterpoint to Ben Leventhal and Eater, and to that end, more often than not, a force to be reckoned with. And yes: He (along with co-editor Daniel Maurer) got a James Beard award for Grub Street. So, yes, he got plaques.
The Retirement: All of that said? Blogging was apparently hard work. Who knew? Ozersky has since called the food scene he helped perpetuate "brutally" fickle and noted the various ways being a food blogger absolutely fucking ruined his life. He's also the only guy on this list to have beefed with two other members of this list: David Chang (see above) and Robert Sietsema, who called Ozersky out for taking a number of freebees at his wedding from well-regarded (and even more well-covered) chefs like Michael White, a rift that made its way to the pages of the New York Times.
The Legacy: Everyone in the food world knows him, he's got a James Beard under his belt, he runs a food festival for meat (Meatopia), and he's been profiled by, yes, Thought Catalogue. He's still very much in the game, making videos for Ozersky TV, writing clolumns for Rachael Ray and Time, and running a mailbag for Esquire. LET CUTTY LIVE.

Kenji Lopez-Alt

The Reverse-Engineering Wizard

Blog(s):Slice, A Hamburger Today, Serious EatsPrime era:2008-2013
Raising the bar: There's no doubt that Serious Eats changed the food-blogging game, providing the ultimate platform for the new-millenium foodie: detail-obsessed, SLR camera-toting, willing to go to any lengths—either in the kitchen, or on the F train—for the perfect bite. But while Ed Levine deserves credit for founding the site, it was Kenji who pushed its mission to the extreme, turning the Food Lab into a must-read column that one-upped itself time after time. His contributions were, and continues to be, high production value blogging at its best: beautiful photographs, good writing, servicey concepts, and a clear mission: To use food science to help readers make better grub at home.
Blog dogs: Kenji's dogs, Jamón (a.k.a. Hambone) and Yuba, feature prominently on Serious Eats and make their owner more awesome by association.
Required reading: While Kenji has a deep stash of classic posts, we've always been partial to his epic burger missions. In addition to the famous 'Fake Shack' mission, in which he sought to crack the code of Danny Meyer's cultish chain, check out his reverse-engineering of the Spotted Pig's chargrilled burger, as well as the insanely ambitious side-by-side tasting of Shake Shake, In-N-Out, and Five Guys.

Ben Leventhal

The O.G.

Blog(s):Eater New York/Eater Network, NBC's The Feast (R.I.P.), Grub Street (guest blogger), She Loves NYPrime era: 2004–2008
Also See: Lockhart Steele, Eater co-founder and publisher.
In The Beginning, There Was The One-Pager: A long long time ago (early aughts), on an Internet far, far away (Lower East Side, mostly), Ben Leventhal ran a little site called She Loves NY. It covered all the basics: The greatness of The Balth. The Resy-Feed. The winner of the Amy Sacco Prize (Amy Sacco). The thing spoke in a voice and a language all of its own, chalking out the kind of cool little space the Internet just didn't have at that point—something localized and dramatically in-touch with the on-the-ground restaurant and nightlife scene of New York, and how it was viewed (or even: intellectualized) by its most reverent denizens. Eventually, Lockhart Steele—then at Gawker Media, the publisher of a real-estate blog called Curbed, and a blogger in his own right—and Leventhal teamed up for something that was half-hobby, half-job, all thrills: A little restaurant-scene blog called Eater. Ben brought the vernacular, the slang, the ResyFeed, the Deathwatch, the mores, and the inalienable (but also: previously never-articulated) truths over from She Loves NY. Lock brought the Plywood Report and the bloggy instincts. Eater was born: Lock would be its publisher and one-third writer, Ben would pilot the rest of the ship and take care of the day-to-day.
Spread the Word, Matty: Restaurants and nightlife in New York had never been scrutinized on a daily basis—if they were characters, they were already bonafide, having made it into the pages of the New York Times. And this is to say nothing of what was happening in downtown or even Brooklyn—yes, restaurants in Brooklyn that aren't Peter Luger—which barely saw the kind of coverage their uptown brethren got. That was all about to change. Eater covered the day-in, day-out of the New York City restaurant and nightlife scene, from who was expanding (Plywood Report), to who was closing (Deathwatch!), to who had reservations that night (ResyFeed), to what star rating Frank Bruni would affix to that week's Times restaurant review (a feature that inspired such devotion and loathing, someone did a statistical analysis of it). Leventhal chronicled the city's restaurant-scene characters, from the goliath in rage (Jeffrey "El Chod" Chodorow), to the rising star (hello, David Chang), to the fringe elements (miss u, Abby Diaz), and back. Over the course of your average week, Eater was accused of reckless rumormongering, slander, favoritism, and generally being completely full of shit. And while the first three may be in the eye of the beholder, the last one repeatedly proved itself to be wrong: Eater became the place where the first word was often the last word, an anti-establishment island of news about food ideas, trends, and forthcoming "official" news that would later become conventional wisdom. Unlike the efforts of Ed Levine's Serious Eats or Josh Orzersky's Grub Street, Eater under Leventhal never felt like a "food blog" for "foodies"—it wasn't celebratory so much as skeptical and even-keeled, and it held purview above all. If it celebrated anything, it was the characters, and especially the ones who understood its fundamentally punk impulses (David Chang, unsurprisingly; Keith McNally, surprisingly).
Memorable Moments: In 2007, when Momofuku Ssäm Bar appeared to be an Asian-burrito gimmick that made enfant terrible Dave Chang look like he'd turned out a sophomore slump of a second restaurant, Leventhal was the first to note the new menu at "Ssam 2.0" (classic Eater) as what "may very well be the best dining experience in NY right now." Hyperbolic? Of course. Laughed at? Sure. But the call was right: That new menu was the thing that took Chang from rock star to stadium status. Also of note: In 2008, when New York restaurants were crashing and burning left and right, Eater took what was, for the first time, a show of empathetic solidarity with the restaurant community when Leventhal penned a note explaining why they had suspended the infamous Eater Deathwatch.
The Legacy: By the time Ben Leventhal left to go pursue other ventures full-time, he and Steele had inspired what's now an endless sea of imitators who'd like to think otherwise (the truth is, you're reading this on a food blog that so obviously and painfully wouldn't exist without Eater, just like every other). Ben even tried to start one—NBC's The Feast, no doubt hamstrung into failure by corporate fun police. He's still a lifelong member of Team Eater, however, and is now the president of a little company changing the home-chef/catering experience called Kitchensurfing. He still writes, of course—this is a man who in his spare time solves the food-world mysteries lesser full-time scribes obsess over when he's not expounding on proper coffee shop form. Steele has remained the publisher of the Curbed Network/Eater, and has overseen its expansion to 25 sites (a national site, and 24 cities) while other competitors have either pared down or closed off regional outposts. Eater remains on the top of the food blog chain, and Leventhal's run on it—backed by Steele—remains the standard-bearer for what great restaurant-world blogging should be: Meaningful, knowing, relentlessly of the moment, and enormously fun.
It's All in the Game: The fact that people—many people—in the industry routinely declare Eater a cesspool of hype, ill-will, slander, and everything else that erodes the fantasy of a good, honest, mom-and-pop–driven restaurant scene is evidence enough of its enormous influence. Did Eater create the less savory elements, or just bring it to light? Whatever your opinion, it's hard to argue that Leventhal and Lock didn't revolutionize the game.

Latest News

Now Trending

FIRST WE FEAST participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means FIRST WE FEAST gets paid commissions on purchases made through our links to retailer sites. Our editorial content is not influenced by any commissions we receive.